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Durham, N.C. — It’s been a year since House Bill 2 advanced through the North Carolina General Assembly.

The law requires people to use public bathrooms that correspond with the sex listed on their birth certificate. The so-called bathroom bill is an intersection of gender identity, religion, politics and power.

Rochester, Minn. — After nine years of epileptic seizures and no success stopping them, Sheri Finstad was ready to try an experiment.

In October, she came to Rochester, where Mayo Clinic doctors implanted a device in her brain designed to deliver mild electrical pulses and record the brain’s reaction.

It’s a stimulation therapy used typically to treat Parkinson’s disease and other neurological disorders. Finstad, a 32-year-old social worker from Fargo, became one of two patients to try it for epileptic seizures after federal regulators OK’d an exemption.

Kellogg, Minn. — In a sandy tract of grassland where the Zumbro River empties into the Mississippi, Jeff LeClere wades in waist-high grass.

The scientist’s visit to Weaver Dunes, is the latest foray to the area where researchers have long studied turtles, falcons, bald eagles and other wildlife populations.

But LeClere isn’t looking up. Instead, he has his eyes open for reptiles that slither in the grass. A herpetologist for the Minnesota Biological Survey, LeClere is leading its effort to catalog Minnesota’s snake species and estimate their population.

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Meet Elizabeth

Elizabeth is a writer, radio producer and storyteller with the goal of finding and telling remarkable stories.
She got her start in journalism working at The Miami Herald and the South Florida Sun Sentinel. Her work has also been published in dozens of other newspapers and websites.